Case Study: Gnosis uses OpinionX to ditch internal assumptions in favor of user-driven roadmap prioritization.

Prioritizing your product roadmap is a difficult task for product teams of all sizes, but when you're paving the way in an emerging industry and dealing with customers ranging from individual consumers to millionaire traders and multinational companies, those prioritization challenges become a different beast altogether.

When we met UX Researcher Kristina Mayman in mid 2021, the product team at Gnosis Safe was starting to realize that their internal DIY methods for prioritization weren't giving them the data they needed to confidently validate their roadmap decisions. As a data-driven team, Gnosis Safe was looking for better sources of data to inform their roadmap prioritization. That's where OpinionX came in...

Gnosis is a crypto startup founded in 2015 that has a range of Ethereum infrastructure products. With $12M in funding raised in 2017 they are a defining voice in the cryptocurrency world. Their products include Gnosis Safe (the Web3 operating system, which stores $46 billion USD in ETH and ERC20s) and Gnosis Protocol v2 (which leverages batch auctions to provide MEV protection plus integration with liquidity sources across DEXs to offer traders the best prices).

Martin Köppelmann, CEO and Co-Founder of Gnosis.

Before they started using OpinionX, Kristina told us that team at Gnosis Safe had a "pretty lengthy process" to decide on what they would prioritize each quarter:

"We would look through our internal user research database and say — 'ok, I saw people mention X or Y more often, this seems like a big issue.' We would discuss, triage and prioritize that list internally, but overall this was not a very solid approach to saying which things should be prioritized." — Kristina Mayman, UX Researcher at Gnosis Safe.

Over the past few months, I've heard this same process play out at countless scaling startups. When it comes to optimization, startups have product analytics data down to the individual pixel to inform their decisions, but for new product development, those same data-driven companies revert to internal voting and workshops.

When Kristina and Product Manager colleague Lukas came across OpinionX, they initially saw it as a better method to understand internal priorities. The team worked together to build a list of 30 user-facing problems which they added to a stack ranking survey on OpinionX and sent throughout the company.

Once the results started coming in, they realized that the same simple stack ranking process carried out with users rather than colleagues would yield even more valuable data. Kristina wasn't alone — their internal test was the perfect way to get buy-in from the team for an external stack ranking pilot.

"It really helped that the OpinionX survey is so short; you can go through it in a few minutes. Being able to add a column to our roadmap that sorts the whole thing by what users say is most important to them is so easy and clear for the team. It definitely gives us more confidence in our roadmap planning." — Kristina Mayman, UX Researcher at Gnosis Safe.

Kristina and the product team at Gnosis Safe used a simple Intercom banner to source users for their stack ranking survey.

How did Kristina go about encouraging users to participate in the stack ranking? By adding a simple Intercom banner within the product, Gnosis Safe had 114 users jumping in to share their opinion on the list of problems the team had built. Not only that, but those same users submitted an extra 55 problem statements to help the Gnosis Safe team to discover new problems that they might have missed during their internal planning.

"Our roadmap is a living document that's always changing, but every three months we clear the backlog and start with a clean slate. Within two or three weeks of launching a new roadmap, we're focused on the next one. The team are already thinking about how we'll use OpinionX again and how we could use stack ranking for ongoing user-driven prioritization and engagement." — Kristina Mayman, UX Researcher at Gnosis Safe.

If your roadmap prioritization is driven by internal assumptions, politics, or DIY calculations, OpinionX is a simple but powerful way to put your users and measurable data back at the heart of your product decisions. Start building your first stack ranking survey for free today with OpinionX.